The Industrial Revolution
When people think of slavery, the first image that might come to mind is black bodies bent over in a cotton field. But that is just part of the story. The cotton being picked in those fields was virtually worthless without a way to turn it into something useful. The Industrial Revolution was coming regardless of whether cotton pickers were paid a little, a lot or not at all, but that “not at all” component most assuredly helped quicken things:
Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in de Bow’s Review…was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the north.”
Capitalism
It is easy to forget that just as democracy was an experiment when America was founded, so was capitalism. Capitalism seems like a natural organic evolution from feudalism to mercantilism, but its fate as the dominant economic ideology was anything but assured. It may never have turned out to be even close to what it is now were it not were for one particular element facilitating the process:
Cotton planters, millers, and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distance. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating of this new system was slavery.”
Sugar
The author states it plainly: “It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything.” In the history of slavery, sugar earns itself a metaphor that, with a simple change in color, has been attributed to a number of different items which revolutionized the economic system of the world:
“White gold” drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations and, fo the British in particular, shored up the financing of their North American colonies.
The Only Racial DNA
There is no actual DNA associated with race. Biologically, race exists with all the tangibility of the Tooth Fairy or a delicious diet soda. As a social ill, however, racism is very much a part of the nation’s metaphorical genetic construction:
“American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue is “cataloguing the dominant and recessive traits.”
Black Music
The inspiration, creation, playing, and very idea of black music is situated throughout as metaphor. It is music standing for something much larger than merely the production of vibrations and sound. It is a thing which has been appropriated even though the very nature of appropriation seems impossible:
“The attempt to rerecord it seems, you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes per se. You’re catching the spirit.”
